PART 6

Search engine submissions

Search engine submission continues to be a part of the search engine marketing trade, although not as important as it once was.

Most search engines prefer finding your webpages on their own. However, letting the search engines know about new sites and pages does not hurt, as long as you don't overdo it.

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Don't worry too much about submitting your sites to the search engines. If there are other sites linking to you, they will find you.

Buying your way to the top

You may actually buy a top placement in search results, not in the regular search results, that is, but in special section of the result pages allotted to such text ads ("sponsored results").

There are a large number of search engines providing such services, the major ones being the Microsoft Adsenter (for Bing and Yahoo!) and Google AdWords.

The amount you have to bid to get to number 1 varies from keyword phrase to keyword phrase, as does the minimum bid. If you think the major ones are too expensive, you may first test your skills at one of the smaller pay per click search engines. Kanoodle will, for instance, give you 5 US$ worth of clicks for free.

Andrew Goodman of Traffick has written a fine introduction to Google AdWords, an ebook that also includes some general advice that might be used when submitting pages to all pay per click search engines.

Pandia has a separate resource page for pay per click search engines.

From the Lost Apocrypha of Search Engine Marketing:

"Holy Moses! What kind of machine is this?" Phillipus Fogg exclaimed.

"This is my new steam powered search engine," Leonardo von Edison explained.

"Really?"

"Yes, really. Write your question on a piece of paper, and put it into this compartment. The search engine will then search its archives in order to find an answer to your question."

"And who puts the answers into the machine in the first place?" Fogg asked.

"I call them my little spiders," von Edison answered."I have 498 messenger boys running around in the Kingdom taking notes. These notes are put into the machine. I also get quite a few search engine submissions -- Spam mostly."

"All right, my friend - let's test this machine of yours!" Fogg wrote down a few words on a piece of paper and gave it to von Edison.

"'Where is my wallet?'" von Edison read. "No, no, no! You must be more precise and give it keywords that can help it sort out your problem. Let's see: 'Where is the wallet of Phillipus Fogg, Esquire, 45 Oxford Road?' Now, that's better. Let's put your question into the machine and wait for a reply. It should only take a couple of hours."

Finally von Edison tore off the paper containing the search engine's answer. "The wallet of Phillipus Fogg is in the pocket of Mister Frederick Appleby, Stoke upon Trent," von Edison read. "That can't be right," he added nervously.

"Damned!" Fogg exclaimed and looked in his pockets, "I should have known that I could not trust that fellah'!"

Submitting Sites

Here is the good news: Sites that are already represented i a search engine index need not submit their pages on a regular basis. As long as there is a link between a page already in the search engine index and the new page, the search engine will find it.

(That does not guarantee its inclusion, however, but that is another matter.)

There are still companies out there that try to sell you submission services for the search engines. These are of no use whatsoever. Unless your page is an isolated island in the wide ocean of the world wide web, the search engines will find it. You do not need to tell them about it.

If you do want to keep them up to date on the structure of your web site, you may provide them with an XLM site map, but this is not necessary.

One quite efficient way of getting a web page indexed early, is to tweet about it on Twitter. If several persons link to the same page in a short time -- or you have established a reputation as a serious and popular "tweep", the search engines will soon sniff out that particular page.

Search engines vs. search sites and portals

Please note the difference between a search engine and a search site. A search engine is the database that delivers search results, a search site is the website that lets you search this database. Some search engines are used by many search sites.

There are now only two major search engines left in the English speaking world: Google and Bing (which also powers Yahoo!). In other parts of the world, there may be other important players, like Yandex in Russia or Baidu in China.

To make things confusing, most search sites also present results from search directories (i.e. catalogs of sites hand picked by human editors, cf. the Yahoo! Directory or the Open Directory). This is why some search engines will ask you to submit your site to the directory as well as to the search engine.

Most search sites and metasearch sites will add links from fee-based pay-per-click search engines.

Checking your ranking

The time it takes for search engines to revisit your site and refresh their database will vary. Normally it takes from two to six weeks.

There are two main exceptions to this general rule:

If you update your site frequently, a search engine like Google may consider it newsworthy and start crawling it more often, normally every day. This may even get you a small boost in the rankings.

The good thing about being revisited frequently is that you may evaluate the effect of your search engine optimization efforts much sooner, which gives you more room for experimentation. If your new coding does not work out, you may return to your old version more quickly, without loosing significant amounts of traffic.

If you have a site with a large number of pages, or many sites, checking your ranking for all relevant keyword phrases, may be very time consuming.

Where to go from here

Reading this guide is only the beginning. Now you should go on to read more detailed introductions to search engine marketing.

We have already recommended popular ebooks on the trade, including Planet Ocean Communications' Unfair advantage book on winning the search engine wars and Mike Grehan's ebook on Search Engine Marketing.

Then you should subscribe to the most important newsletters on search engine optimization, Pandia's own search engine newsletter included.

You may also keep track of search engine developments by reading various online search engine news columns. Our own search engine news section include links to SE news sources and weblogs from all over the world.

Another way of staying up to date and getting help is following the discussions in one of the Web's many search engine marketing forums. One of our favorites is Webmaster World.

Time is money. It could be that you cannot afford to spend too much time on doing your own search engine optimization work. If this is the case, you must get in touch with a search engine optimization company. Use the knowledge you have gained through reading this tutorial to sort out the charlatans.

Contents

1 Search Engine Marketing 101
2 Selecting Search Keywords
3 Search Engine Friendly Code
4 Search Engine Friendly Webdesign
5 Link Popularity
6 Search Engine Submissions

More on search engine marketing

Pandia's search engine ranking resources
Links to search engine optimization tools and resources
Feature articles on search engine optimization

See also our Goalgetter tutorial on how to search the Web

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